The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu

On the island of Kai Besil the earth trembles with the threat of a terrible fire to come. The forbidding Pillar of Lan Yu plumes white with new smoke, and the warning flames in the village of Talamau burn red and blue with dire promise. Can heroes be found to restore the volcano’s ancient binding, or are the islanders doomed to perish in fire and choking ash?

The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu is a playable module for most OSR games, but its real purpose is as a worked example and a resource for other small publishers interested in old-school module page design. The module has been built to echo early 1980-era TSR module layouts, with sections exampling village, wilderness, and dungeon layouts. A "Commentary" layer in the PDF can be turned on and off to explain the particulars of each page's design choices.

The files include the PDF itself, the .IDD InDesign source file for Adobe InDesign CC, and an .IDML InDesign markup file that should be backwards-compatible with many earlier versions of InDesign. An art folder is also included with the art used in the module, all of which was either made by myself or drawn from the free Scarlet Heroes Art Pack available on DTRPG. Any of it can be used freely for your own projects, whether personal or commercial.

All users are encouraged to take the module apart and use its pieces for their own projects. While a perfect replication of TSR trade dress is generally a bad idea in your own work, you can use the objects, paragraph styles, and page layouts for your own products. The commentary layer provides hints as to why the choices were made for each, and you can carry this information into your own creations.

Can we assume this is set in the Red Tide campaign setting? And if so, where is the island located?

Brandon GDecember 31, 2014 12:29 am UTC

PURCHASER

Anyway to have the commentary be off natively, as on a tablet it can't be toggled off and on with some pdf software?

Kevin CDecember 31, 2014 6:46 am UTC

PUBLISHER

Actually, it already defaults to being turned off- it sounds like your PDF viewer is just automatically displaying all layers. As a workaround, from Adobe Reader X on your computer, you can select File->Print, and just print it to a new PDF file. That will automatically strip away everything but the visible layer.

A fantastic little module. Very old-school in setup and presentation. It's got some mini-sandbox elements to it that could be blown up to cover 3 or four full game sessions. ACTUAL PLAY EXPERIENCE: If you're willing to truncate the setup a litt [...]

Good module with interesting alternate magic (specifically the undead variant Hollow Children). I will definitely use them in my other campaigns.
I highly recommend reading this just for the thoughtful and complete "sub-world" the temple and [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

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Original electronic format

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